I’m putting up my top five posts from our We Have Always Done It That Way book. You can see number five here, and number four has to do with conflict and email. I am planning on expanding on this post, by the way, and writing an e-book about it (but no promises on a delivery date!).

Fighting via Email

Email is a wonderful tool, particularly for associations who need to manage communication with members and volunteers who are often spread out across the country, or even the world. Even among staff in the same building, it enables a higher volume and higher speed of communication.

Like any tool, however, email is not right for every job. Take, for example, that time when you were angry with a colleague or had a conflict with a volunteer about how to manage a project. You got an email from this person that you feel went one step too far. You then sat down at your computer and shot off an email response, laced with frustration and indignation (known in some associations as a “nasty-gram”). Of course, you made sure to copy a few colleagues and/or supervisors, so everyone could see how “correct” your point was.

The problem is, the email response you then get from your colleague is even nastier, and includes a now expanded list of recipients. You’ll be frustrated because for some reason your colleague did not address the rational points you made in your email—he brought in new points that are only distractions to the issue at hand! You’d better get started on that reply email. Is there any way you can copy the entire staff and board?

This pattern is all too common, and we must stop it.

Using email to communicate in conflict situations never works, and it usually makes things worse, because email communication is designed for simple information exchange, not complex communication. All conflict situations are complex—if they were simple, they would be resolved by now. Conflict situations require deeper communication than email allows. It requires back and forth, clarification of positions, examination of assumptions, and communication at the level of logic and emotion at the same time.

You can’t do that with email, because in email, there is no tone. When two people talk to each other, most of the meaning is conveyed in nonverbal communication, particularly the use of tone. Which words you emphasize and the pattern of raising or lowering tone as you speak is absolutely critical for people to know what you really mean. Consider the following point you made in your email:

“Things were going great, and then Bob came into the room.”

The reader of the email has to figure out what you mean. On one hand, you might have felt that things were actually going poorly (you were being sarcastic by saying they were great), and you wanted to make a point about how relieved you were that Bob came in the room to save the day. On the other hand, you might have meant that things really were going great—until the moment Bob came in, and it clearly it went downhill from there. The only way the email recipient would know which of these two drastically different meanings is accurate would be through your tone (which does not exist on email), or by context. That is, if they already know that you don’t like Bob, they will guess that you were implying that things were going downhill.

So not only do emails rob communication of tone, making the communication inherently more confusing, they also force the recipient to determine what you mean based on their previous knowledge of who you are and what you think. In conflict situations, that is not likely to be an accurate (or pretty) picture, so they are even more likely to interpret what you are saying in the worst possible way. Clicking the “send” button on an email in a conflict situation is like clicking on an automatic “escalate” button.

The answer, of course, is to not send the email. Walk down the hall. Pick up the phone. Make it the norm in your association to de-escalate the conflict when you get that frustrating email by responding directly, instead of through a nasty-gram. It may take a bit more time in the short term (and you will need to brush up on your conflict resolution and communication skills), but it will save volumes of time in the long run by enabling quicker and more direct resolution of conflict.